Street Fight Daily: What to Know About Amazon’s Fast-Growing Ad Biz, Are Publishers Now Like Tech Vendors?

5 Things to Know About Amazon’s Fast-Growing Ad Biz (Street Fight)
Search “Amazon advertising,” and the first webpage you’ll find comes from the e-commerce giant itself. The pitch? In a phrase: “Reach millions of customers who find, discover, and buy at Amazon.” It doesn’t get much more compelling than that. Here are five things you need to know about the most legitimate challenge to Google and Facebook’s digital ad dominance. NYT: Cities’ offers for Amazon HQ2 are secrets to many city leaders

Are Publishers Becoming More Like Tech Vendors? (eMarketer)
For some publishers, thriving in the digital age involves building technology so that they can sell it to other publishers. Trei Brundrett, COO of Vox Media, spoke with eMarketer’s Ross Benes about why licensing software makes sense for some publishers.

Street Culture: SproutLoud’s Reinvention Requires Collaboration (Street Fight)
Channel marketing automation company SproutLoud had a circular problem: the turnover was bad, which was bad for employee morale, which was causing more turnover. The company’s internal culture was deteriorating—a point at which many startups have struggled to reset their environments, and a point at which SproutLoud’s leadership team took responsibility.

The Walmart-Amazon Rivalry Is Reshaping How We’ll Buy Everything in the Future (Verge)
In the last six months alone, Walmart has partnered with scores of tech firms to better compete with Amazon and make progress in markets that may become pivotal years down the line.

Performance Marketing Should Play a Larger Role in Brand Creative (AdExchanger)
Marissa Tarleton: Brands want growth and differentiation, but that cannot be done with investments in brand or performance alone. Most best practices now suggest that the smartest media approaches are those that accomplish both brand-building and performance benefits cohesively.

REACHING THE MASSES

Sinclair, Tribune Hit With Antitrust Suits by Advertisers (MediaPost)
Sinclair Broadcast Group and Tribune Media have been hit with at least three separate antitrust suits for allegedly conspiring to set the price of TV ads.

Airbnb for Work Now Accounts for 15% of Bookings (TechCrunch)
The company says that Airbnb for Work, which launched in 2014, has seen bookings triple from 2015 to 2016, and triple again from 2016 to 2017. In fact, Airbnb says that almost 700,000 companies have signed up for and booked with Airbnb for Work.

Media Veterans Form Venture Targeting B2C Brands (Variety)
A trio of seasoned media and tech execs—Betsy Morgan, Brett Bouttier and Jeff Berman—has teamed up to form Magnet Companies, a holding company looking to buy and build direct-to-consumer companies and maximize their reach, engagement, and revenue.

TAKES & NEWS FROM THE TOP

Apple’s Worth $1 Trillion. So What? (Quartz)
Mike Murphy: So what does Apple’s vast valuation actually mean for the world? Is a trillion-dollar company a shining achievement for the human race? Probably not.

August Core Algorithm Update Still Rolling Out (Search Engine Land)
On Wednesday, Google said it had begun rolling out a broad core algorithm update for search results. On Friday we learned that the update is still rolling out and will continue to roll out, likely until sometime next week.